1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a technique for writing content data such as moving picture data or audio data on a storage medium. More particularly, the present invention relates to a technique for writing data that has been obtained with a camcorder, a digital camera with a moving picture shooting function, or a cellphone with a built-in camera.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, various types of camcorders for writing audiovisual (AV) data, including video data and audio data, on a randomly accessible storage medium such as an optical disc or a flash memory (which will be referred to herein as a “random access medium”) have been proposed.
Such a camcorder generates a file every time a recording session, which starts at a writing start point and ends at a writing end point, is done. A group of those files generated is treated as a group of nonlinear files on a random access medium.
That is why if recording sessions are performed numerous times using such a random access medium, then a lot of files will be generated on the random access medium. In this respect, the random access medium is quite different from the conventional tape medium on which data is written linearly.
Nevertheless, some inconveniences will be caused by the generation of such a lot of files as a result of recording sessions. For example, if the user has performed recording sessions numerous times to shoot his or her child's play on a field day, then a lot of moving picture files will be generated. In that case, when the user copies those series of moving picture files, containing his or her child's field day shots, from a random access medium to another storage medium, he or she usually has to select his or her desired files one by one from the random access medium, which is a very time-consuming job for him or her.
Also, recently, moving picture upload sites on the Internet have attracted increasing attention, and people save their data in a data storage space on the network more and more often. However, in saving those moving picture data files and/or uploading those files to an AV server with a broadcast function to use those services, the user also usually needs to select and upload a lot of files he or she likes, which is very much troublesome for him or her. On top of that, when the user wants to view and/or listen to a moving picture consisting of those uploaded files as a content on the AV server, he or she has to select his or her desired files from a huge number of moving picture files, which cannot get done easily, either.
Generally speaking, the more quickly an upload can get done, the better for users. That is why to get the search done more quickly, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2002-229889 teaches a technique for automatically sensing an electronic camera be mounted on a cradle and starting an image processing program. Then, the image data will be transmitted from a PC toward the service center's server over the Net.
According to the method of Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2002-229889, however, if a lot of moving picture files were uploaded to an AV server, the user should also look through those many moving picture files in the AV server to find his or her desired content, thus making it difficult to select his or her desired content quickly. That is to say, that method cannot contribute to getting the search done quickly in such a situation.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a recorder that can process data files on the supposition that those files will be uploaded to a server and that makes it easier to select and play those data files before and after the files are uploaded.